VirtualBox Networking Setup

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:32:43 +0000

Every time I go to set up VirtualBox and several VMs I always forget how I setup the networking for them. Once again, I went through the pain of trying to figure it all out, so I might as well document it for future use.

The Problem

When creating virtual machines, especially virtual linux servers, I want them to be able to do the following things:

Connect to the Internet
Connect over SSH from my Host Machine to the Guest Machine
Have the servers connect to each other on a private internal network

Out of the box, a VM is configured for #1, however it cannot do #2 and #3. There are some solutions that do some archaic port forwarding by issuing special commands from the Terminal. This is just painful, and if you just want one port to work, that’s manageable, but what if you want ssh, ftp, myql, http, https, etc? Any on multiple VMs? What a nightmare! What is painful is when googling for a solution, almost every “answer” is this crazy port forwarding method. There is a much cleaner, better way!

Solutions on Justin Carmony

VirtualBox Networking Setup

The Problem